A couple of musical numbers in The Rose of Corazon are worth attention: Perry Ojeda has a nice I'm-your-Mr.-Fixit song, and Celina Polanco has an all-too-brief turn as a clockwork bureaucrat unable to deal with the drought that has befallen this small Southwestern town. Later in the play, she reveals a big belt of a voice. But the score generally achieves and all-over Richard O'Brien-played-by-Carlos Santana sameness, and the lyrics are duds. Thomas C. Hase lavishly lights the play in the confines of the black box Studio Theater.

Flag Day, from the volatile Lee Blessing, is a pair of one-acts . In the opener, two executives, one white and one black, bitterly confront one another, but only by two-minute intervals, as prescribed by the HR department. It works as an writing exercise, perhaps, but less so as theater.

After the intermission, we see a homeless man (Tex, played by the perennial favorite Lee Sellars) suspended in midair, impaled, as it were, in the car windshield of Dot, a black woman who is long on attitude and short on affect. The action of the play consists in waiting for Rex to die in Dot's garage, and had the piece been about Rex's suffering, something tragic or blackly comic might have come of it. (At one point, an omniscient alter ego of the playwright tells Rex, "You're going to die, but it will take longer than you expect," evoking the best of Samuel Beckett.) But unfortunately, Dot offers a weak race-relations-based explanation of why she will do nothing to help Rex, and the play closes with the ineffective spectacle of Rex's flag-draped corpse. That there is anything to watch at all is due to the skill of Sellars, who can convey more to us—hanging as he is in a harness, only one arm free, his throat constricted by supporting armature—than most actors can do with both feet on the ground.

Moving over to the Frank Center Stage, Stuart Flack examines the nuances of suspicion and trust in the post-9/11 landscape in Homeland Security, a tense political drama. Susan, an earnestly liberal young woman, begins to wonder exactly why it was that she and her physician boyfriend Raj from the Northwest of India were taken aside for questioning on their return from an overseas trip. She wants to be helpful without betraying trust; in frustration she tells her FBI questioner, "I've told you nothing. I haven't told you anything." Scott Whitehurst nails the role of Thomas, the FBI operative who smugly says, "There are no right answers." He cuts off other characters at the end of their speeches with razor-sharp speed.

Towards the end of the action, Susan encapsulates her dilemma in words when she tells Raj, "Of course I trust you. It's other people I don't trust."

Fareed Haque and Kaylan Pathak supply live "Indian and Western" music as accompaniment that is only briefly too heavy in its commentary.

The basilisk stare of Lee Sellars as Don powers the comedy in Rounding Third, Dresser's acerbic offering that puts two Odd Couple fathers together to coach their sons' Little League baseball team. Don, a just-scraping-by wired-up house painter, is a knot of rage against the happy and successful. This makes his character wickedly funny. What keeps him going is winning on the diamond, at all costs; as he explains, the winners have it made:

His foil is Michael, played very well by Andy Prosky, a khaki-clad paunchy soccer dad who is tethered to his glorified gofer job by his cellphone. Michael's let's-have-fun-playing ethos clashes with Don's monomania with predictable results: comedy ensues. It's great fun to watch Michael's posture on the bench gradually change over the baseball season: by the playoffs, he's hanging from the cyclone fence with the big dogs, a dramatic change from his first-timer's pose that looks like he's riding the pine sidesaddle.

posted: 7:17:25 PM